The aim of a cognitive narratology, as I see it, is to develop the literary and generally semiotic study of narratives through cognitive modeling, and to develop cognitive studies of mind and meaning by integrating insights from literary scholarship. In this article, I first examine the concept of narrative discourse (versus descriptive and argumentative discourse); second, I discuss the princi...

How do we know when critical terms lose their power? Could it be that some of the fundamental notions of literary and cultural studies have been adopted so broadly in so many contexts and disciplines that they explain too much, and thus not enough? This is true for terms such as textuality, discourse, narrative, and representation, some of our colleagues have claimed. If critical terms originat...

Discourse varies with age, education, psychiatric state and historical epoch, but the ontogenetic and cultural dynamics of discourse structure remain to be quantitatively characterized. To this end we investigated word graphs obtained from verbal reports of 200 subjects ages 2-58, and 676 literary texts spanning ~5,000 years. In healthy subjects, lexical diversity, graph size, and long-range re...

The Western novel, practicing imperialist Africanism, has historically othered Africans as savages. Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian writer, appropriated the colonizing West’s language and narrative to present the colonial encounter from an African perspective. Interestingly enough, both African and non-African scholars believe that Achebe’s novels inadvertently reproduced the essentialism that reduce...

This paper is situated within the debate between “specialist” and “generalist” methods of analysis in the study of world literature. It is argued that a systemic linguistic discourse analysis of appropriately encoded text passages can provide a methodology which can be utilised to interrogate the national and international demarcations of comparative literary analysis. A case study consisting o...

It has recently been noted (Onrust 1994) that two journalists at the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad have introduced a new style of reporting on soccer and other ball games. Their articles present a mix of factual reporting of events, background information, interviews and commentary, employing a variety of literary techniques. Most notably, reactions and opinions are often reported in th...

Literature and Cognition applies methods and ideas from computational linguistics and cognitive science to literature. It explores a wide range of topics, and is intended to be read by literary theorists as well as by computational linguists and cognitive scientists. From the perspective of computational linguistics, the largest contributions are to present Hobbs's previously published theory o...

COVID-19 pandemic has brought new social and discursive contexts with the metaphorization gothification of virus for many purposes ranging from reporting to politics. This reality is similar Lawrence Buell’s notion toxic discourse. The discourse pandemic, like discourse, both useful harmful in ‘risk society’ that exposed infection economic downslide. While on one hand this integral raising awar...

This study aims at exploring postcolonial themes raised by Andrea Hirata’s Laskar Pelangi (Rainbow Warriors). Specifically, it will reveal the characteristics of hybridity found in the novel that prove this literary work may be categorized as postcolonial writing despite the fact that western or white colonialism has no impact or trace at all in the novel. Furthermore, the study will prove that...